17 Acre New Farm In Middle Georgia For A Permaculture-inspired Orchard Of Perennial Nut Trees & Annual Medicinals.
TAYLOR COUNTY, GA - MAY 2022
Heather Fritz is an architectural photographer and drone pilot by trade in the Atlanta area. She decided to surrender to God and found herself the steward of 17 acres in middle Georgia. The plan is to design an organic poly culture orchard around nut trees, perennial foods, and annual medicinals.
As a breast cancer survivor, chemical free growing is not just preferred, it’s essential. “I think cancer is our bodies rejecting this life, how we treat our bodies and how far removed from our food we have become. We started eating organic venison harvested ourselves since I finished traditional cancer treatment in 2010,” explains Heather. “If I am going to grow something, it has to help our bodies with the inflammation response.”
She and her husband purchased 48 undeveloped acres for deer hunting the summer of 2019 and closed on an additional 9 acre parcel with a house two days before Georgia shut down for Covid-19 in March 2020. “When we were able to buy the 17 acres that connects the two parcels in October of 2021, we knew we had a responsibility to be a good steward of this gift and to make something sustainable - for us, the animals and the earth,” said Heather.
They cleared off half of it in May 2022 - the right side of the image above. “We are in an area of commercial agriculture (i.e. pecans, peaches, strawberries, cattle, hay, corn and cotton), but I didn’t want to do what everybody else was doing. I also didn’t want to use chemicals and harvesting large crops in the dead of summer was a terrifying thought. I was led to turmeric early in 2022 and felt my heart get excited; I read an article about an older couple that were growing turmeric in southern Georgia with similar soil type and climate and suddenly this crop was on my radar. As a first time, older farmer and a cancer survivor, the characteristics and benefits of Turmeric made it the perfect crop for me,” explains Heather.
“I stumbled upon PermaCulture and went down the rabbit hole, feeling like this approach was intuitive and logical. I had never gardened or even done yard work on a regular basis my whole life, so the notion of starting a project like an orchard was almost unbelievable and honestly overwhelming. But my default is to educate myself so I was all in,” said Heather.
Heather started her first permaculture project in March 2022, installing 3 raised beds in a future garden spot and designing a water retention system as she doesn’t live in Taylor County full time and it needed to be as sustainable as possible for a week or three at a time.
“As I looked at the contour of the land, I thought it made sense to try to capture the water and keep this whole area moist as much as mother nature will help us. I had no water plan other than a manual water hose that reached this area. I filled the beds with forest debris, sticks covered with fungi, leaves and leaf mold, purchased mushroom compost, and top soil. Then I added red wiggler decomposing worms and covered. I fed the worms consistently with food scraps. I’ll let those beds decompose for several months, then add a layer of aged cow manure from my cattle rancher neighbor and start planting in a couple months. I got to witness the water system in action when we got a lot of rain in a short time; water held in this area for over 10 hours until it fully absorbed. We have sandy soil so holding the water until it can permeate is beneficial and a challenge.”
After doing a lot of research, she decided to sculpt the land to hold onto rainwater to drought-proof the land. It won’t look like a typical flat Georgia pecan orchard with only one type of tree in perfect rows. The design will work with the contours and the plantings will flow in waves across the land. “I got my drone out and flew up to the tree canopy along the edge of the cleared land; I imagined standing on the porch of a treehouse in this huge oak tree and looked out over the orchard. Suddenly I saw ribbons or wavy lines of different crops running through the landscape,” Heather said.
Heather feels that learning how to grow food has been pushed out of our culture as we become more “civilized,” replacing fresh whole foods with a deep reliance on packaged food that magically appears in stores or arrives on our doorstep. She believes that we all should be growing food at some level and passing along these skills or one day we all will wake up and realize that we have forgotten how to grow food and/or not even be able to in the depleted dirt that’s left behind from all our abuse.
“Everyone knows about carbon and it’s part in atmospheric temperature; reducing our carbon footprint is a goal that is pushed as part of the global warming or climate change initiative. The messages are reducing or eliminating emissions, but our commercial agriculture is a big part of the problem. It’s not sustainable with the viscous cycle of poison and fertilizer on monocrops, stripping the topsoil and distroying the microbiology that is needed for healthy soil. Plants collect carbon and trap it in the roots underground, keeping it out of the atmosphere; this is a fundamental law of nature that we are ignoring in order to profit while bringing food to the masses,” Heather explains. “I’d love to see us take our personal human energy resources as seriously as we take gas and electricity; the human digestive system is our power converter, healer and/or source of many health problems.”
ABOUT BLOODFIRE ORCHARDS, LLC
A business owner in Woodstock for over a decade, Heather Fritz runs Bloodfire Studios, LLC, an art studio that specializes in drone, architecture and food imagery. Heather is taking her signature brand and applying it to her new venture of sustainable agriculture. Bloodfire Orchards is located in Taylor County, Georgia. The permaculture-inspired 17 acre orchard will combine nut trees, perennial foods and annual medicinals. For more information, contact Heather@bloodfirestudios.com, 770-Two Five Six-7073, www.BloodfireOrchards.com
